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This chapter asks what kind of institutions will be pro-poor, focusing on the ability of those institutions to deliver access to key markets and services – especially labour, capital, and agricultural inputs, but also health services and legal services – by poor people. In the case-study countries, this has been achieved not only by the development of new forms of pro-poor expenditure and taxation, as described in the previous chapter, but also by the development of schools and training courses, health centres, physical infrastructure, microfinance institutions, and liaison institutions...

This chapter asks what kind of institutions will be pro-poor, focusing on the ability of those institutions to deliver access to key markets and services – especially labour, capital, and agricultural inputs, but also health services and legal services – by poor people. In the case-study countries, this has been achieved not only by the development of new forms of pro-poor expenditure and taxation, as described in the previous chapter, but also by the development of schools and training courses, health centres, physical infrastructure, microfinance institutions, and liaison institutions between the state, the private sector, and the non-governmental sector. Minimizing risk, which is often the main hazard for the poorest people, is also very important. This chapter constructs a ‘pro-poor institutions’ (PPI) index which assesses the ability of institutions in the case study countries to facilitate access by poor people to the markets named above, by analogy with the pro-poor expenditure measures of the previous chapter. This index correlates well with the trend of headcount poverty in this book’s case-study countries.